New Travel Column in Paper Sky

Here's my latest column for Paper Sky magazine--on travel and trauma, danger and disaster, and the uselessness of alliteration:



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On the newly legal 'hentai' erotic, pornographic manga/anime site, FAKKU, for The Japan Times

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Finding opportunities overseas with the ‘art of hentai’ By ROLAND KELTS When Jacob Grady began pirating anime and manga online eight years ago, he was still in college. He took out student loans to pay the server bills, and figured that if he ever made enough money from the site to purchase a round-trip flight to Japan, the effort and expense would be worth it. Like many Americans, he got hooked on Japanese pop culture as a kid through the Cartoon Network’s action-oriented programming block called “Toonami” (“cartoon tsunami”). He would race home from school to catch the latest episodes of “Dragonball Z” and “Gundam Wing.” But Grady was not pirating anime adventure series or kids’ shows like “Pokemon.” The content on his site was what most non-Japanese call “ hentai ” (abnormal, perverted), and in Japan is still largely known as ero-manga, ero-anime, or just porno. “At some point, going through puberty and exploring the Internet for the first time, I came across hentai,...
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BBC TV interview on virtual sex and Japan's declining birth rate

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(click to play)   I gave an interview in Tokyo to the BBC for a documentary about Japan's birth rate. I talked about Japan's expanding menu of options for virtual romance and sex — from dating sims to erotic manga, anime and video games. It's not just Japan, of course. The annual birth rate here remains higher than it is in South Korea, Singapore or Hong Kong, and birth rates have also been steadily declining in the United States and across Europe. Options for virtual romance and sex are increasingly popular in developed nations worldwide. Dating app , internet hookup and pornography addiction are hackneyed phrases by now. But what I didn't know during the shoot was that virtual romance and sex would be among the safest, sanest and most responsible options for intimacy in the middle of a global pandemic.
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